Voyager: a space odyssey – in pictures

Voyager: a space odyssey – in pictures

Thirty-five years after leaving Earth, Voyagers 1 and 2 have reached the very edge of the solar system. Here are some images from an exceptional space journey

Saturday 20 October 2012 11.01 EDT

Aboard Voyagers 1 and 2 are identical golden records, carrying the story of Earth far into deep space. The 12-inch gold-plated copper discs contain greetings in 60 languages, samples of music from different cultures and eras, and natural and man-made sounds from Earth. They also contain electronic information that an advanced technological civilisation could convert into diagrams and photographs

Launched from the Kennedy Space Centre, Cape Canaveral, Florida, by a Titan rocket, Voyager 1 was the second of two spacecraft launched in 1977 to explore the planets in the outer solar system. It overtook Voyager 2 on the way to Jupiter. Voyager 1 made its closest approach to Jupiter in March 1979 before flying on to Saturn

Ejection plumes on the surface of Io, one of Jupiter’s moons, were seen for the first time by navigation engineer Linda Hyder. They revealed Io to be the most geologically active body in the solar system, with hundreds of volcanic eruptions

The suggestion of an ocean beneath the strange icy crust of another of Jupiter’s moons, Europa. This has since become a prime candidate, among astrobiologists, for possibly harbouring extraterrestrial life

Uranus’s moon, Miranda, apparently assembled from the smashed-up fragments of earlier worlds of rock and ice, perhaps destroyed in a giant impact even – which might also account for the 90-degree tilt to Uranus’s own axis

In 1989, Voyager 2 made our first close encounter with the stunning blue planet Neptune. Its surprisingly turbulent, storm-laden atmosphere, this far from the sun, was clearly being driven by heat from deep within the planet

Jupiter's rings are invisible from Earth and do not show any structure similar to the rings of Saturn or Uranus. They are made up of dust and rock fragments. They were discovered by Voyager 1 and further investigated by Voyager 2 in 1979. As they contain no ice the rings reflect little light, making them difficult to see

The Voyager family portraitThis is a composite photograph of six of the solar system’s planets taken from a vantage point 6bn km above the plane of the solar system. This final photograph uniquely revealed our home planet as a very humbling ‘pale blue dot’, as Carl Sagan described it